Misfeasance

“Misfeasance” is basically a fancy way of saying, “What we did was legal, but we did it wrong.” And no, Kelly Clarkson did not sing about this one. In other words, the action we took was lawful, but it caused someone somewhere some harm. Most of the time, misfeasance is unintentional, unlike its shady cousin “malfeasance,” which is when we purposely do something bad for our own personal gain (or the gain of our organization).

But back to misfeasance. Let’s say we temporarily lost our mind and agreed to host a princess-themed birthday party for a bunch of seven-year-olds in our backyard. We strung up the whole yard with fairy lights, but we accidentally got white fairy lights instead of pink ones, and now the whole party is a disaster, seven-year-olds are crying, and the birthday princess is convinced that this might very well be the end of the world.

This is a horrible travesty and we feel terrible about it, but we didn’t do it intentionally. The good news is that we can’t be held legally liable for our misfeasant fairy light fracas, but the bad news is that our poor princess is most likely scarred for life. Or at least until next week, when she forgets all about the offensive white lights and the temporary trauma they caused.